UPDATE, AUG. 17, 5:21 P.M.: In federal court in Santa Ana today, Judge David O. Carter ordered Mattel to post a $315 million bond while the El Segundo-based toy manufacturing giant fights a $310 million award to MGA Entertainment.
It's the latest twist in the trade secrets legal battle the makers of Barbie and Bratz dolls have been engaged in since 2004.
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Carter, who recently ruled in favor of Bratz's MGA, gave Mattel until Tuesday to come up with the bond. An appeal, the judge said, could drag the case out another two or three years.
It's already cost the companies hundreds of millions of dollars.
UPDATE, AUG. 12, 12:55 P.M.: Mattel is appealing a Santa Ana
federal judge's recent award of $310 million to MGA Entertainment in the
trade secrets war that's raged since 2004 between the respective makers
of Barbie and Bratz dolls.
“Mattel remains committed to finding a resolution that allows us to
conclude this litigation on terms that are reasonable and fair to
Mattel,” reads a statement from the El Segundo-based toy manufacturing giant.
UPDATE, AUG. 10, 9 A.M.: We told you in May that MGA Entertainment, which was victorious in its federal trade secrets case against Mattel, had proposed the Barbie-maker fork over $339 million to the Bratz manufacturer as compensation.
MGA came up only $29 million short of that recently when Judge David O. Carter awarded it $85 million in punitive damages and $2.5 million in fees and costs to go along with the $137 million in fees and costs Mattel was previously ordered to pay the smaller doll maker.
“Mattel asserted a copyright claim that was stunning in scope and
unreasonable in relief it requested,'' Carter explained. “The claim imperiled
. . . the only serious competitor Mattel had faced in the fashion doll
market.''
UPDATE, MAY 25, 9:30 A.M.: Analysts agree that in the seven years since Barbie-maker Mattel first went after Bratz manufacturer MGA Entertainment in court, the smaller company's fortune dwindled while Mattel remained a toy industry giant.
MGA is hoping to retrieve $339 million of that fortune in Santa Ana's federal courthouse this week.
That's how much Judge David O. Carter is being asked to award the Van Nuys company in damages, restitution, attorney fees and other fees. It's also three times more than the $88.4 million in damages a jury ruled MGA is entitled to last month.
Mattel, which is based in El Segundo, obviously, does not agree with MGA's proposed inflation. Saying its copyright infringement claims were “objectively reasonable,” Mattel maintains it should not have to reimburse MGA Entertainment for court and attorney fees.
A $177 million chunk sought by MGA for punitive damages is based on the jury agreeing Mattel misappropriated trade secrets by sneaking employees into showrooms with MGA products. The Mattel reps used phony business cards to pose as doll buyers. Mattel downplayed that Nixonian dirty trick in its May 13 response to MGA's award proposal.
“At issue in this case is, at most, a sneak peek at 26
toys displayed at six toy fairs over a six-year period,” Mattel lawyers wrote. “No one
died. No towns were lost. MGA suffered no actual injury and did
not even claim at trial that it did.”
Carter could rule on MGA's request this week.
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UPDATE, APRIL 21, 12:31 P.M.: The sluttier, younger chick wins!
A federal court jury in Santa Ana not only rejected claims that MGA Entertainment's popular line of Bratz dolls violates the copyright of Mattel's Barbie, but the panel awarded MGA $88.4 million for trade secrets
misappropriated by Mattel.
The jury found Mattel “acted willfully and maliciously in misappropriation of any trade secrets.”
This legal battle has been raging since 2004 (catch up on the history in the original post on next page). A different jury in 2008 ordered MGA and its chief executive
Isaac Larian to pay Mattel $100 million. That was thrown out on appeal last year. The case returned before Judge David O. Carter in Santa Ana because his U.S. District Court jurisdiction includes Mattel's corporate offices in El Segundo.
The failure of management there to settle the case with MGA will go down as a “tremendously bad decision,” according to at least one industry analyst.
“It means they wasted $400 million
or so of shareholder money to get zero return,” BMO Capital Markets' Gerrick Johnson tells Reuters.
One prays Ken canceled his hair-frosting appointment to console a distraught Barbie.
ORIGINAL POST, JAN. 13, 7:24 A.M.: Considering the preponderance of plastic, empty-headed bleach blondes
one finds around these parts, at least a few have likely found their way
into the federal courthouse in Santa Ana. But the two fitting the same
description going before a judge at the Reagan today have achieved icon
status without boob jobs, sugar daddies or Balboa Bay Club pool
privileges.
They are Barbie and the Bratz, the girlhood dolls of different generations.
Mattel Inc., which owns Barbie, is trying yet again to prove in court that MGA Entertainment
Inc. stole the toy company's intellectual property when it created the Bratz line a decade ago.
In 2004, Mattel alleged MGA hired away a Mattel employee who had originally created the Bratz sketches for Mattel. A jury in 2008 awarded the worldwide toy brand a cool $100 million. But the 9th District Court of Appeals overturned that verdict, so back before Judge David O. Carter the two sides go.
In the months leading up to the new trial, MGA has accused Mattel of destroying evidence and other legal misdeeds that Carter has already indicated the jury will not hear. But the judge will allow MGA to present evidence of Mattel dispatching “gumshoes” to infiltrate
toy fairs at which MGA displayed its products. Mattel has called those accusations part of a “meritless,
last-minute effort to deflect attention from MGA's years of
well-documented wrongdoing.”
Meanwhile, toy-industry watchers say the Bratz line is not as hot as it was back in
the day, that the legal fees to fight off Mattel have already left MGA crippled.
“If Mattel wins, what do they win?” Sean
McGowan, a toy-industry analyst at Needham & Co., tells Reuters. “They get a shoddy
brand that's a shell of its former self.”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.